Dental prostheses are typically manufactured at specialized dental laboratories that employ computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) milling systems to produce dental prostheses according to patient-specific specifications provided by dentists. In a typical work flow, information about the oral situation of a patient is received from a dentist, the dental laboratory designs the dental prosthesis, and the prosthesis is assigned to a block of material, or material blank, having size, shape, color, and material-type properties suitable for creating the prosthesis. The material blank is generally a pre-sintered ceramic, and is associated with unique predetermined shrinkage information corresponding to a factor by which the material blank will shrink when fully sintered. Many conventional dental milling systems then determine numerical code for machining the dental prosthesis that accounts for the unique shrinkage information associated with the assigned material blank, thereby tying the production of the dental prosthesis to the assigned material blank. Thus, a given dental prosthesis cannot be manufactured until the specified material blank is placed in a milling machine, which can slow production of dental prostheses, and reduce system resiliency to equipment failure. Accordingly, improvements to dental milling systems are desirable.